All Built, Waiting to Announce

I ran the PyInstaller builds on all four platforms, Mac OS, Windows 7 32-bit, and Ubuntu 32- and 64-bit. The process in each case is

• Build the app and run it for a sanity check
• create the PPQT2 folder containing the app, the README, the COPYING.TXT, and the extras folder
• zip that folder with output to ~/Dropbox/Public/PPQT2
• do something else while Dropbox loads the ~50MB file to the cloud
• suspend that development VM
• activate the test VM of the same platform (identical OS but no Python or Qt installed)
• do something else while Dropbox updates that VM's copy of /Public
• copy the zip file to the local desktop and unzip it
• take a deep breath and hold it
• run the app and exhale Yessssss! when it comes up and all features work.

Repeat for the next VM.

I was relieved to find that a 32-bit Win7 app runs just fine on a 64-bit Win7 installation. I was also relieved that the dev version of PyInstaller for Python3 worked perfectly in all three OS's. This is such a change from just a few months ago when I went through several weeks of agony trying different ways to bundle an app, including cxFreeze, pyqtdeploy, and nuitka.

What changed everything was that Hartmut Goebel and the other key maintainers of PyInstaller suddenly returned to activity with a long (and continuing) flurry of updates and fixes. The long-idle Python3 fork was merged to the mainline and got some key updates, and everything got good again. I feel a lot of gratitude toward those guys.

So now what for PPQT2? Right now I am waiting for the right moment to announce its availability on the DP forum. I think that will be Wednesday night; then I will be available to respond to forum comments promptly for four days straight. Meantime I am thinking hard about how to announce it, especially how to convey the importance of third-party contribution of Translators.

I have a couple of enhancements still to code. I promised I would write an ASCII Translator, just because I don't want my Knuth-Pratt paragraph justification code to be lost. And of course there will be some bug reports to deal with. But with any luck this project will be finito by the end of July.